BOSTON (MA)
The Boston Globe
March 13, 2019
By John R. Ellement
Aaron J. Hernandez’s first-degree murder conviction must follow him to his grave, the state’s highest court ruled Wednesday as it jettisoned a murky 44-year-old legal principle that would have erased his conviction.
The former New England Patriots star was convicted in Bristol Superior Court in 2015 of murdering Odin L. Lloyd in June 2013 in North Attleborough, but he committed suicide in his maximum security prison cell in 2017 before the appeal of his murder trial could be heard.
A lower court judge had thrown out the conviction, relying on a legal principle known as “abatement ab initio” that became part of Massachusetts case law via a 1975 ruling by the state Supreme Judicial Court.
In its 6-0 ruling Wednesday, the high court said it could not find a “reasoned analysis” to have ever used the concept in the first place.
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